Creating A Portfolio That Makes Recruiters Come To You

Building a personal portfolio looks nice and feels good, but it rarely helps engineers find jobs. In this video, we cover how you can truly stand out as a software engineer and make the jobs come to you (instead of the other way around).

Here are the core points:

• Building a portfolio website can be a nice exercise, but don't spend too much time on it. Don't expect to get any inbound recruiter reach outs due to your portfolio site. There is no real central repository of them that recruiters browse.
• In terms of what recruiters do browse, it's primarily LinkedIn. If you have this portfolio energy, it's much better spent polishing your LinkedIn profile instead.
• At the end of the day, a portfolio website is resume++. This means that your foundation is still your resume: Make sure your resume is extremely sharp before you even consider building a portfolio website.
• Alex found a lot of success having his Google Play developer page be a portfolio as it hosted real, verifiable products on it. Since his side projects got millions of installs combined, he's gotten reach outs from top companies like Uber, Square, and Instacart through his Google Play developer email.

Related resources:

• "What technologies or stacks should I create a project to add in my resume for entry level software jobs?"
• "I want to land a job in a big tech as a SWE - How to do it?"
• "Can Github stars grab big tech recruiters' attention?"